These accounts apparently never spread misinformation. In fact, they posted real local news, serving as sleeper accounts building trust and readership for some future, unforeseen effort.

"They set them up for a reason. And if at any given moment, they wanted to operationalize this network of what seemed to be local American news handles, they can significantly influence the narrative on a breaking news story," Schafer told NPR. "But now instead of just showing up online and flooding it with news sites, they have these accounts with two years of credible history."

And then, one day, I think in 2013, Twitter and Facebook were not really very fun anymore. And worse, the fun things they had supplanted were never coming back. Forums were depopulated; blogs were shut down. Twitter, one agent of their death, became completely worthless: a water-drop-torture feed of performative outrage, self-promotion, and discussion of Twitter itself. Facebook had become, well … you’ve been on Facebook...

There is an argument that this my fault. I followed the wrong people; I am too nostalgic about bad blogs; I am in my 30s and what I used to think was fun time-killing is now deadly. But I don’t think so. What happened is that the internet stopped being something you went to in order to separate from the real world — from your job and your work and your obligations and responsibilities. It’s not the place you seek to waste time, but the place you go to so that you’ll someday have time to waste. The internet is a utility world for me now. It is efficient and all-encompassing. It is not very much fun.

A random walk through some of the 3,000-plus files provided by the committee shows that the vast majority got a tiny, tiny number of “impressions” — which simply means they appeared in someone’s news feed. And most got an equally minuscule number of clicks, and in some cases none at all. Did simply viewing these ads cause anyone to change their mind about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, or about issues like immigration or Black Lives Matter?

Experts in this type of disinformation and propaganda warfare, which has been going on since before the internet and social media were invented, say pushing people in a specific direction often isn’t the point. As Facebook noted in an internal security report released last year, much of the activity involving fake social-media accounts spreading misinformation didn’t seem to have any specific goal, but instead appeared to be designed simply to sow confusion.

Facebook had replaced much of the emotional labor of social networking that consumed previous generations. We have forgotten (or perhaps never noticed) how many hours our parents spent keeping their address books up to date, knocking on doors to make sure everyone in the neighborhood was invited to the weekend BBQ, doing the rounds of phone calls with relatives, clipping out interesting newspaper articles and mailing them to a friend, putting together the cards for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas, and more. We don’t think about what it’s like to carefully file business cards alphabetically in a Rolodex. People spent a lot of time on these sorts of things, once, because the less of that work you did, the less of a social network you had.

“Third-party data providers allowed us to target their email lists with precision,” said a digital marketer who counted betting companies among his clients before leaving his agency last year. “Lower-income users were among the most successfully targeted segments.

“We could also combine segments, ie we could target users who are on less than £25k a year, own a credit card and have three kids, via these providers.”

It’s funny, but despite being largely written by women interested in gender equality, many of the reviews I have linked include sections about ways in which these unequal expectations harm men. For example, the workplace backlash review I cited above includes a section pointing out that men who are more interested in focusing on communal coalition building in the workplace than competitive interaction are penalized, as are men who show proficiency in any skills that seem just a hair too feminine.⁸⁰ Scientists who work on gender from a feminist perspective are in no way hurting men by seeking to dismantle structural inequality, because the existing structural inequalities also hurt many men, as well as many people who identify as neither men nor women.

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting “liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right....

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)

All, or most, of these accounts are fake. They’re phony. They’re liberal wish fulfillment. They’re telling you what you want to hear. There’s evidence that they’re fake. It’s fiction, like a social-media West Wing repackaged for the resistance, confirming your biases and giving you the (phony) gossipy thrill of insider knowledge....

I blocked these rogue government accounts as soon as they started proliferating on Twitter, and it was the best social-media decision I’ve made in 2017. They’re a distraction from reality — bad fiction to make you feel good. If we want to change the world, we have to support truth and transparency, and that means prioritizing good journalism over ineffectual fan fiction.

He looked at his list of abstracts and did the math. Purchasing the papers was going to cost $1000 this week alone—about as much as his monthly living expenses—and he would probably need to read research papers at this rate for years to come. Rahimi was peeved. “Publishers give nothing to the authors, so why should they receive anything more than a small amount for managing the journal?”

Many academic publishers offer programs to help researchers in poor countries access papers, but only one, called Share Link, seemed relevant to the papers that Rahimi sought. It would require him to contact authors individually to get links to their work, and such links go dead 50 days after a paper's publication. The choice seemed clear: Either quit the Ph.D. or illegally obtain copies of the papers. So like millions of other researchers, he turned to Sci-Hub, the world's largest pirate website for scholarly literature. Rahimi felt no guilt. As he sees it, high-priced journals “may be slowing down the growth of science severely.”

Researchers analyzed more than one million transactions on the e-commerce platform and discovered that women made an average of 20 percent less selling new items than their male counterparts. They made three percent less than men selling used items. The takeaway here is that, if your eBay username is Michelle1805, you might get $80 for a smartwatch that your friend Mike1805 could sell for $100.

It's a media world ritual to eat food and confidently argue with friends over things none of you actually has the answer to. So, as we count down the final months of the Four Seasons lunch, here's a time capsule of some Fall 2015 recurring debate topics to bury along with it. And, for what they're worth, the sides I've found myself arguing. We'll start with TV and move onto digital topics...

In other words: Many famous social media stars are too visible to have “real” jobs, but too broke not to. Platforms like YouTube mirror the U.S. economy’s yawning wealth gap, and being a part of YouTube’s “middle class” often means grappling daily with the cognitive dissonance of a full comments section and an empty wallet. Journalists kvell over stars like Swedish gamer Pewdiepie, whose net worth is around $12 million, or comedian Jenna Marbles, who’s worth around $2.5 million. On the other extreme, fan-funding sites like Patreon (a Kickstarter-type site that allows for ongoing funding) are at the center of a communal movement to fund “smaller YouTubers.” But that definition gets blurry. Is someone with 50,000 subscribers worth supporting financially? How about 200,000? What if people assume you’re too successful to need money, and you’re too proud to tell them otherwise?

Faced with a local ISP that couldn’t provide modern broadband, Orcas Island residents designed their own network and built it themselves. The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA), founded by Sutton, Brems, and a few friends, now provide Internet service to a portion of the island. It’s a wireless network with radios installed on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington.

In addition, many images retrieved by the web’s top search engine happen to be hyper-sexualized caricatures. Some female construction workers in midriff-baring flannel and jean shorts seem better dressed for a Halloween party than, say, a demolition site. (Researchers dubbed this the “sexy construction worker problem.”) “It’s part of a cycle: How people perceive things affects the search results, which affect how people perceive things,” said co-author Cynthia Matuszek, who now teaches computer ethics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Since Operation Torpedo, though, there’s evidence the FBI’s anti-Tor capabilities have been rapidly advancing. Torpedo was in November 2012. In late July 2013, computer security experts detected a similar attack through Dark Net websites hosted by a shady ISP called Freedom Hosting—court records have since confirmed it was another FBI operation. For this one, the bureau used custom attack code that exploited a relatively fresh Firefox vulnerability—the hacking equivalent of moving from a bow-and-arrow to a 9-mm pistol. In addition to the IP address, which identifies a household, this code collected the MAC address of the particular computer that infected by the malware.

But according to new research led by the University of Exeter, older people garner some important benefits from exposure to online social media — a group of seniors introduced to this technology had "heightened feelings of self-competence, engaged more in social activity, had a stronger sense of personal identity and showed improved cognitive capacity" as compared to a control group, explains the study's press release. "These factors indirectly led to overall better mental health and well-being."

The things you say on Facebook apparently reveal a lot about your personality, according to a large new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that finds an association between words used in Facebook posts and personality traits. The results are pretty fascinating, not because they're surprising but because they're so spot-on, exactly what you'd expect from introverts, extroverts, and the like.

It’s been proven time and time again that Facebook knows more about you than you know about you. While advertisers are able to use that data in their targeting, it’s often poorly executed (which is why I, a Jew-ish guy, often see ads for Christian dating sites), but as a Facebook user you’re never able to see WHY you’re being targeted. This was exactly what I planned to use to exact my revenge. I was going to target him with highly personalized messages that were focused on things Facebook truly shouldn’t know about his personal life – things that weren’t even online, let alone on Facebook. The goal, to make him unbelievably paranoid.

A coalition of over 50 progressive groups has written a letter to Google asking it to reconsider its support for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a powerful conservative organization that opposes net neutrality. The move comes as sites across the Web prepare for Internet Slowdown Day, a massive protest against allowing Internet service providers to charge for a ‟fast lane” to consumers.

Un1cornbl00d commented on a photo of the couple that was posted to reddit—noting, jokingly, that the woman looked like his or her sister. The photos and related comments have since been deleted, and reddit complied with the request in early April 2014. (The user later said that he or she does not have a sister.) “I haven't heard anything about it since,” un1cornbl00d wrote on Monday. “I won't say where I live but I'm sure when they checked out my IP address and saw that it was more than 1000 miles from Delaware they probably figured I was lieing...” (sic)

Fewer than half of the members of these focus groups have Internet access at home (though if you count mobile Internet access, it’s about 6 in 10). Among immigrant participants, who tend to face language and literacy barriers, that figure drops to about a third. Comparing ethnic groups, Seattle’s Latino community is the least connected, according to the larger survey, with a quarter reporting no home access.